1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to improvements in a booting procedure, especially to a storage device, a method for accelerating a booting procedure, and a storage controller.
2. Description of Related Art
As electronic devices are widely spread, end users obviously look forward to devices ready for immediate use. Industries in this field generally respond to such demand in the manner of accelerating the speed of data access.
A computer system is taken for an example. The bottleneck of the computer system's immediate use function is start-up operation, reboot operation, preparation of a user control mode, or the like. In detail, before shutdown or entering a low power standby mode, the computer system turns off most of its devices and keeps booting data in a storage device. Before start-up, reboot or entering the user control mode, the computer system reads out the booting data stored in the storage device to make itself ready for use. Accordingly, the procedures of the start-up, reboot or preparation of the user control mode need a lot of efforts to relocate the booting data for allowing a user to use the computer system immediately. Therefore, if the time (hereafter, booting time) necessary for the said procedures is too long, user experience of immediate use is unpleasant. There are several ways to reduce the booting time. One is to simplify the initialization procedures for the devices in a basic input/output system (BIOS) requiring initialization. One is to adopt a uniform driving procedure to reduce the waiting time caused by exceptional operation in running an operating system. And one is to use a flash memory storage device instead of a mechanical hard drive.
However, in consideration of that the data addressing manners for a computer system and for a storage device are different, a data access instruction from the computer system is required to be translated by a storage device controller before the data corresponding to the instruction in the storage device is accessed. The time for the above-mentioned access process is the responding time of data access operation, and the responding time occupies a considerable portion of the booting time. Unfortunately, the current arts aiming at the acceleration of booting procedure do not take the responding time seriously.